So, back from the trip to Scotland.
It was way too short! Only 6 days, and that includes two 15 hour ferry trips, so more like 4 days. But we got a lot done.
While on the ferry, about an hour west of IJmuiden we ran into this giant offshore windfarm:
Each of those is 2 MW!
On the second day (we slept on the ferry) we went up to Edinburgh, this was quite the experience for me because I'm used to driving on the 'right' side of the road.
In the UK (if you didn't know that already) they drive on the left (the 'wrong') side of the road. The first 10 minutes off the ferry where the longest in my life, after that my pulse rate dropped to something a bit more acceptable and after a day or so it felt more or less natural. Edinburgh isn't too far from Newcastle (where the ferry lands), and somewhere in the afternoon we arrived at Fungus' house. Of course being all excited and with lots of stuff to show and talk about we completely forgot to make pictures!
After several hours we said our goodbyes, Gus and family directed us to the Cruachan Dam, one of Scotlands hydro plants. This was *most* impressive. Imagine a storage battery that will hold a 3000 MWh charge!
Here is a cutaway view of one of the turbine/pump units:
There are four of them, each is about 100 MW, the system functions like a giant battery, when there is more demand than generating capacity the system will pull water from the lake (about 1000 ' overhead (or 350 m)), and use it to drive the generator. When the demand is lower than baseline generating capacity the excess is used to pump water from the loch back up to the reservoir.
Here is a shot of the 'baffles', which is where the water is returned to the loch.
After taking the guided tour (NO PICTURES ALLOWED 
), we talked a bit with the tourguide (Archie, really nice guy) if we could see the dam itself, and he directed us to a little sideroad off the nearest village that would take us all the way to the top. The only snag was you had to do it walking. Well, nothing against a bit of exercise so we decided to walk up the hill. Just follow the powerlines and you really can't go wrong.
The views are absolutely breathtaking, here in front of the baffles you see a floating structure on the loch, this is where they grow rainbow trout. The water that exits the generating station is sufficiently warm to alter the average temperature of the loch water to such a degree that this species can be grown here. Apparently one night in the recent past something went wrong with the cages and they all opened, every able bodied Scotsman was on the shore fishing the next day.
Security at the dam was pretty tight, we had to get past these fierce and armed Scottish Highlanders to pursue our goal of reaching the summit, we managed to take evasive action and after that they left us alone:
We figured the threat of terrorism must be rather low in Scotland, but that's hardly surprising since the Scots are such nice people 
Our first view of the dam. It doesn't look very big in this picture, but that's just because it is still quite far away. Going up a 1000' hill doesn't sound like much either, but for once Scotland had some pretty hot days and in that kind of weather it is quite a climb.
The fusebox This is where the three 275 KV lines come out of the shaft running all the way down to the generators. The amazing thing here is not that this is all fenced off, the amazing thing is the height of the fence. A nasty person with a length of chain and no particular desire to get old could do a lot of damage here.
To make sure you know what you're looking at this nice sign was provided by Scottish Power: (which was good, it could have been that we had gone up the wong hill)
A good view of the reservoir. Keep in mind that even though it looks very small it is quite deep, and the 350 M head really helps in making this setup effective.
Some of the nicer stats of the whole installation are that it can go from idle (air spun) to full capacity in under 30 seconds.
We made lots more pictures on the trip, but those are not RE related, if you feel like browsing them the album is at:
this url
